1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an ideogrammatic character editor method and apparatus and, more particularly, to creating, editing and communicating ideogrammatic characters.
2. Description of the Related Art
An ideogrammatic character is a symbolic representation of a word. Each Japanese Kanji character as shown in FIG. 1, for example, is an ideogrammatic character comprised of a freestyle arrangement of strokes arranged to express a unique meaning. The form and orientation of the strokes must be accurate because the meaning of each character can change dramatically from "DO" as in the Chinese character of FIG. 2A to "THOUSAND" as in the character of FIG. 2B with the change of a seemingly insignificant stroke 200. Further, the position of the Kanji characters in relation to each other is extremely important and, in the case of the Japanese Haiku of FIG. 3A, the distancing of characters imparts a sense of time passing. In fact, entirely different words can be created by placing characters together. Ideogrammatic characters and their variations, therefore, provide the author with the creativity to represent a potentially infinite range of expression.
Heretofore, there has been no practical ideogrammatic editor which provides the author with the creativity to readily read/write, edit and publish ideogrammatic characters locally or over networks such as the internet. It is impossible as a practical matter to accurately create ideogrammatic characters because the detail required, the potential limitless types of strokes, and the variations of the characters would require an astronomical amount of RAM. Currently, editing ideogrammatic characters requires an impractical exercise of painstaking hours of manipulating individual pixels. Communicating ideogrammatic characters is impractical because ideogrammatic characters are typically 16-bit character fonts which only can be created/received by specially-configured processors.
Microsoft Word.TM., for example, provides 16-bit characters in a Chinese font which replace the ASCII characters on a computer keyboard. However, the number of "font-based" characters provided is finite and there is no means to easily create new ideogrammatic characters. The number of font-based characters is limited not only by RAM, but also by the limited number of keys on the computer keyboard because each font-based character is assigned to a different key-stroke. It has been a common complaint that font-based character sets do not provide enough characters, forcing authors to manually sign their names or choose characters which do not convey what is really meant.
Further, 16-bit font-based characters do not provide the detail necessary to accurately represent ideogrammatic characters. The Kanji shown in FIG. 1 is scripted in traditional calligraphy which imparts each stroke with a brushed effect. The bit-limited font-based characters have proven far too primitive to capture this kind of detail.
Another shortcoming of the 16-bit font-based character set is that only processors specially configured for 16-bit characters can handle them. Typically, IBM PCs handle 8-bit characters while Applies handle 8-bit characters. Thus, the author who desires to write in 16-bit Kanji, for example, must close all applications, crash the computer and reboot in the 16-bit configuration. This is not only extremely aggravating for the user, it is virtually impossible to write Kanji within other applications for the purpose of, for example, uploading E-Mail since the 16-bit character editor must be accessed separately from the Internet application.
Another problem is that conventional font-based applications generate the font-based ideograms from phonetically-spelled words typed in by the user. Since, for example, there are more than a 100 dialects of Chinese, the conventional applications limit those who speak the less spoken dialects to use a computer. Moreover, such phonetic applications require the user to known romaji characters, i.e., the English alphabet, which most Chinese do not.
Font-based character sets do not allow the user to easily edit the characters. There is no means to easily correct or alter the expression of the ideogrammatic character by altering or repositioning the strokes because the font-based characters are fixed blocks of pixels. Futhermore, the position of each font-based character must conform to a block position on the display according to, for example, a rectilinear typeset with rigid columns of 80 characters wide and 240 rows per page. Since different feelings are represented by the relative position of the characters, such as illustrated by the example of the Japanese Haiku shown in FIG. 3A, and since entirely new words are created by placing words together, as illustrated by the example shown in FIGS. 4A-4C, font-based character sets cannot convey the full range of available expression.
It is impractical to download 16-bit characters because the remote computer must be specially configured to receive 16-bit characters. Thus, the remote computer must be crashed and rebooted in the 16-bit configuration. Otherwise, the remote computer will parse the received 16-bit characters into 8-bit ASCII characters, depending upon the PC, and the remote computer will generate incomprehensible ASCII.
Font-based schemes have proven to be impractical for Internet applications for other reasons. It is practically impossible, for example, to post an interactive home page on the Internet using beautifully scripted ideogrammatic characters. 16-bit font-based characters do not provide the detail necessary to accurately represent ideogrammatic characters. Using higher bit configurations may offer higher detail but at the expense of unacceptably large amounts of RAM.
Scanning the ideogrammatic characters into the home page increases bandwidth as well as access time and is not interactive, i.e. cannot be selected as an option or as hypertext by the user. In addition, scanned images are not easily copied or edited by the user and, for that matter, yield poor prints as compared to characters which are printed from printer codes.
Font-based character computers are costly because they must be specially-equipped with a processor which can handle the 16-bit characters and a keyboard labeled with the characters they represent. To add to this cost, these specially-equipped computers are not widespread in the United States and must often be purchased at a premium from overseas distributors.